“From the perspective of a programmer, Yanni was the perfect combination of perfectionist, creative, flexible and reliable. You could always count on him doing everything he could to have his vision and the designers come into fruition. My main experience with Yanni was working on the rhythm based game step aerobics and Active. The game mode’s main feature was to match animations with the tempo of a song. Yanni had to deal with interesting challenges that lead to features. To name a few he delivered tempo shift while maintaining sounds quality, smooth song transition to avoid animation jerks, instrument focus (bass drum) when the user is messing up in the song. On one occasion we needed a range of footsteps sounds for step aerobics. Instead of mixing some canned footsteps from another game that did not fit, Yanni got myself and the designer of Step Aerobics all in a studio to record what we thought should be the most authentic sound.”
Neilson Mackay, Assistant Lead EngineerElectronic Arts